Public Meetings

From E-Democracy.org

This is a pilot Participation 3.0 effort demonstrating the value of an open and transparent process to further systems-changing online civic engagement.

Through an open standards exploration and pilot demonstration we seek to show how public meeting notices, agendas, documents, etc. can become vastly more accessible across the distributed Web 2.0 world.

In the end, we imagine many websites from the local newspaper, an civic non-profit, to a state government, where the public may enter their address and keyword interests to be pro-actively notified online about public meetings and agenda items that matter to them ... not just from one isolated government, but ALL the government bodies that serve them. To help make this possible, the use of an open standard(s) combined with data aggregating via a new PublicMeetings.Info network would broadly share a new open data set with the core public decision-making information for public meetings.

Project elements include:

1. Open design process - Public meeting notice and agenda requirements and open standard draft

We are engaging the W3C E-Government Interest Group (initial pre-project engagement) via the eCitizen Foundation and others to craft a draft standard on public meeting notices and agendas. It will promote a long-term, distributed solution to help governments and government-oriented technology vendors automate the process of providing public data sets with real-time public meeting information. This is likely the best path to universal distribution of this option to many local communities over the long-run.

Quickly demonstrate the power of a geo-aware tool for personalized alerts about upcoming public meetings from the dozens of public bodies that serve Minneapolis (and perhaps St. Paul). This inform and seek to utilize the open standard draft but in this case the data will be "scraped" by us and converted into XML before being used by our site. We are inspired in part by the new UK-based OpenlyLocal.com open source-oriented site which is scraping and gathering data on the far more centralized local UK governments.

3. Public meeting comments and ratings experiment

Depending up the resources available, we will explore hosting specific public comments/questions/requests for more information and rating of comments/questions/requests to determine those agenda-items with expressed community support, opposition or simple concern. A comment summary/tracking tool for local elected/appointed officials and staff would notify decision-makers on recent comments prior to meetings (comments would be allowed within an hour of when the government body releases the agenda and it is pulled into our system automatically). We will further connect awareness of new meetings/agenda and public comments directly into the 1,000+ participant online town hall Minneapolis Issues Forum.

Resources and Related Links

Rhode Island Open Meeting - State law requires that all government public meetings notices and agenda be shared through a uniform system online. This includes roughly 600 state bodies/sub-bodies and 1500 local government entities. Minutes are also required to be uploaded for executive branch decision-making bodies. Web feed and e-mail notification options are available. The service is very popular.

Additional Notes

This project will test our open source-style design process designed to bring together democracy/participation experts, government staff/interest elected officials, and technologists/geeks in a group process that leads to the most effective results that actually serves the greatest public good with a sustainable "move the field" design as an end goal. This process is a possible model for our evolving Next Generation Ideas open specification process.